2012 Future Prospects

During my month long sabbatical in December 2011, I spent a lot of time reflecting on where I want to go with Gobbo Games and what I want to achieve while getting there ... this reflection was sometimes painful ... but in the end I reached a decision.

2012 will see a fresh start for me, both in my personal life and normal career as well as for Gobbo Games. I have finished off all contracts that were taking up too much of my time and have not taken on any more new ones. My new job pays me enough to not have to take on extra contracts (not something I was able to do for the last two years) and I can now get back and focus on the projects that I want to finish.

Everyone is probably saying ... yeah we heard this all before countless time ... but patience and bare (bear) with me. 8-}


Firstly, Soul Wars will continue to be developed with one important caveat, I am changing the scope of the game to be an Online RPG and not that other one (don't want to mention the word in case I offend people). The idea here is similar to persistent worlds from Neverwinter Nights (the original) with a few USPs that I plan on adding. This past weekend saw me revamp the entire GUI and move the whole game across to T3D 1.2. More information will follow in the coming weeks.


Secondly, Twilight Wars will now move out of Prototype and head off towards a finished game. It will be a Turn Based Tactics game, once again with a few USPs that will hopefully make people want to play the game. I will once again announce more information within the coming weeks.


Thirdly, Wizard Wars will finally move out of Design and in to Prototype stage. This is a Turn Based game based on a Pen and Paper concept that has been around for a few years. It should prove to be a lot of fun to play and fairly addictive. More information to follow.


Finally, Re-Spawn will finally move out of Beta and in to a Public Beta. This is a FPS and was heavily influenced by Quake 2, Quake 3 Arena, and the original Unreal Tournament. I am currently working on the back-end website system for the game in order to provide all the services that I plan on releasing with the game.

Furthermore, I am moving away from Drupal on all my websites and changing to a bespoke system built using Spring MVC, Hibernate, and Java Enterprise Edition. The basic framework is complete and now all I need to do is theme the framework for each game and add all the extra functionality required.

The idea behind the bespoke system for the website is to allow a user to create an account on the main Gobbo Games website and when they register their game, it will automatically transfer a copy of the account to the game website itself ... the reverse of this will also apply. Furthermore, the game websites will provide the main Gobbo Games website with stats and feeds regarding the various games and hopefully will make the site more informative to visit. Well hopefully ... 8-}

All in all I am looking forward to this year. I am under no illusions that this will be a tough road and will be full of challenges ... but hopefully along the way I can pick up some like-minded individuals and we can make it all a reality ... worse case scenario is that I fail miserably ... at least I will have fun doing it and hopefully will learn some valuable lessons.

So stay tuned ... more details and updates will follow. The girlfriend has been given strict instructions to make sure I stay focused ... hope it works. 8-}

Q

p.s. I have no idea why most of my game ideas have "wars" in the logo ... so please don't ask ... it just ended up being like that. 8-p